McLaren F1 designer Gordon Murray looks back on the project with pride and not a little affection, having created his dream car from a clean sheet of paper.

"The satisfying thing for the little team of people that were involved," he says with a smile, "is that 10 years later the might of Ferrari is still trying like crazy to beat this little company in Woking [England]. I thought they of all people would bring out something instantly that would eclipse us. You never see a Ferrari article that doesn't mention the McLaren F1, which is fantastic. It's not just about pure performance, it's driver satisfaction. We didn't set out to build the most expensive car or even the fastest car. We just set out to build the best driver's sports car around."

Murray says the current value of the cars tells its own story. "You can buy a Bugatti EB 110 for £100,000 [$155,218], you can buy an F40 for £90,000, you can buy a really clean Jaguar XJ220 for £80K. If you want a McLaren, you have to pay £1.1 to £1.2 million. That says everything for me. And they don't buy them to put in museums — they buy them to drive them and use them. A lot of customers bring them back with high mileages, which is quite satisfying."

They are so valuable that some folks have bought cheaper ex-Le Mans racers and converted them for street use — although comforts such as air conditioning are absent.

Murray is now hard at work on the Mercedes SLR, which will be built by McLaren in England next spring.

"It's all on track and looking very good," says Gordon. "It's totally different inasmuch as the F1 was not focused on a market at all, it was just literally the ultimate driver's car, while this car is very much focused on a market. The other huge difference is this one's a Mercedes-Benz. That obviously washes through to differences in your approach and the design brief: what you design and how you design it, how you develop it, how you tune the driveability. The thing that complicates it more than anything is that it is a world car, whereas the F1 only had European-type approval." — Adam Cooper